The Barracuda ES is supposed to be for use in servers, and as a result it has a 1.2 million-hour MTBF - almost double that of most desktop drives.

However, other than guaranteed longevity and a price to match, the Barracuda ES is a fairly standard drive. It packs 160GB onto each platter, and HD Tach 3 RW measured the average sustained read rate as 67.8MB/sec and writing as 65.4MB/sec. The access time of 13.1ms is quite impressive though.

These results allowed the Barracuda ES to perform a mere whisper behind the Western Digital Caviar SE in our Crysis level loading test, putting it in the faster half of this Labs test's drives. It was also neck and neck with Hitachi's 400GB Deskstar P7K500 when image editing with the Gimp, achieving a score of 967.

Ultimately, however, it's the price that lets down the Seagate Barracuda ES. If you want the endurance level of a server disk, perhaps in a system that churns 24/7, it might be worth the extra cash. For general use, however, 21p per gigabyte is too much to pay.

• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008

• Creative Zen X-Fi with Wireless LAN 16GB - Peripherals
• DFI Lanparty DK P45-T2RS PLUS - Motherboards
• Hyundai W240D-PVA - TFT monitors
• Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD - Hard disks / storage
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky - Games
• LanCool Metal-Boned K10 - Cases
• Asus Maximus II Formula - Motherboards